Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father have established Mona Simpson as one of our most accomplished writers. In her new novel--the portrait of a legendary, quintessentially American entrepreneur trapped by the age he helped to define--she brilliantly extends her achievement. More powerfully than ever before, Simpson uncovers the nature of longing and belonging, of blood relations and the human heart.

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Présentation de l'éditeur

Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father have established Mona Simpson as one of our most accomplished writers. In her new novel--the portrait of a legendary, quintessentially American entrepreneur trapped by the age he helped to define--she brilliantly extends her achievement. More powerfully than ever before, Simpson uncovers the nature of longing and belonging, of blood relations and the human heart.

From the Hardcover edition.

Biographie de l'auteur

Mona Simpson is the author of Casebook, Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, and My Hollywood. Off Keck Road won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writers’ Award, and, recently, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Simpson is on the faculty at UCLA and also teaches at Bard College.

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Alicia Gomez

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5 mai 2013 - Publié sur Amazon.com

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A Regular Guy is, by all accounts, a novel with tons of biographical details about Mona Simpson's brother, the late Steve Jobs. So while it shouldn't be considered an exact representation of Jobs, it certainly does give some insight into the life of a man who, like him, is very bright, but very emotionally stunted, as well as manipulative and full of contradictions, with some sociopathic tendencies. Owens, the "regular guy" in question, is an infuriating character: petty, immature, hypocritical, but charismatic and with the talent to make everyone around him dance to his tune. Jane, Owens' daughter, is an endearing child, trying to navigate and make sense of a weird world where love isn't always unconditional. I like Simpson's sparse prose and the distanced, somewhat dispassionate tone of her third-person narration. It adds to the bafflement you feel reading about all the odd characters in the story. I also thought it was an interesting, if somewhat unintentional, generational analysis about hippie baby-boomers. But after reading Lisa Brennan-Job's lovely essay about the book, I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable with the fact that Simpson used her then young niece, and the turmoil of her life as the oldest -and for a long time the only- child of such a peculiar man, to write this book. It all feels so predatory and mean, much like the character she created allegedly based on her brother.

This is not fiction. This is embellished non-fiction. The Regular Guy in this book is Mona Simpson's brother, Steve Jobs. It covers his life from the heady years following the founding of a wildly successful company that makes him wealthy to being fired from that company. It covers the life of his resourceful illegitimate daughter and her flaky mother, who live precariously on the fringes of his life, and his interactions with his few tolerant friends and frustrated girlfriends, and odd assortment of women he encounters and sleeps with, or just kisses.

The lead character is named Tom Owens and he started a company that developed a groundbreaking treatment for some disease and is working on a cure for it. Having this substitute for a tech company is a mistake because the types of people scientists are doesn't gel with the types of people the real hippie geeks were.

The story goes nowhere fast for a long time, just meandering through the lives of these people as they orbit around this very peculiar, vegetarian billionaire who lives a Spartan existence and doesn't want to share and doesn't know how to love or care about other people. (Who do you think is Steve Wozniak in this story? Not the co-founder Frank Yu. He's too together. I'm thinking it's got to be the guy in the wheelchair.)

Simpson is a peculiar writer. She writes densely, with layers and layers of detail, much of it unnecessary, on a shoestring of a plot. Many of her sentences are bafflingly convoluted. Where was her editor? For some reason, instead of calling her main character Tom, she calls him Owens throughout the book. Everyone talks about him as Owens. Only sometimes she writes it Owen instead of Owens.

During one chapter, we are told of Owens having an affair with the teenaged daughter of his friends, and then that goes nowhere. It's a shocking detail, a betrayal of his friends' trust, an underaged girl, and then she just drops out of the story. Simpson just dumps everything she knows about her brother, and everything she's heard into a narrative, and pads it out with some made-up parts to fill in the gaps.

Reading Walter Isaacson's definitive biography of Steve Jobs, there are many parallels, and it's shocking to see how much she revealed about his very personal life 15 years ago. Jobs told Isaacson he didn't read the book because he didn't want to be mad at his sister. This book came out in 1997, before Jobs was back in the spotlight, saving Apple and rocketing to even more fame and wealth, so maybe it wasn't a big deal at the time.

Simpson is not so much writing as recording what's going on around her. All her novels have been autobiographical, without her admitting as much, so she is not a great imaginer, and her writing is ponderous. I am at a lost why she wins so many awards, grants and fellowships. But because Steve Jobs is such a fascinatingly peculiar character, such a genius and yet so hateful, I made myself read this whole book, whereas her others I've had to just skim through.

The real daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, has written that she thought this was a very unfair portrait of her mother, but Isaacson's research bears out that the woman is indeed a flake, curiously much like Jobs' biological mother, the subject of Simpson's first book, "Anywhere But Here."